One of the members asked if we could give a little background
on this author who so influenced young Howard P. Lovecraft.

Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron Dunsany, was born on July
24, 1878 at Dunsany Castle, County Meath, Ireland. His uncle was the statesman
Sir Horace Plunkett who first proposed the Dominion structure for the creation
of the Irish Free State. Dunsany's youth was spent with his mother's ancestral
estate, Dunstall Priory, Shoreham, Kent, England.

He attended private schools: Cheam School and Eton and completed his
education at the military college at Sandhurst. When the Boer War broke
out in 1899, Dunsany fought in the Coldstream guards. That same year he
acceded to his title of Baron. In 1904 Dunsany married Lady Beatrice Villiers,
youngest daughter of the 7th Earl of Jersey, and has one son, the Hon.
Randal Plunkett, born in 1906.

When World War I broke out, Dunsany was a Captain of the Royal Inniskilling
Fusiliers. At a very tall six feet, four inches, he remarked that: "Our
trenches were only six feet deep. I shall never fear 'publicity' again."
He was wounded April 25, 1916 but survived the war to continue his illustrious
career. With Dunsany's death in 1957, his son Randal became the 19th Baron
Dunsany.

Though Lord Dunsany had an interesting military and political career,
it his writing which he is best remembered for. Much like Lovecraft, his
youth was spent in fantasy. In a letter to Frank Harris, Dunsany wrote:
"I think I owe most of my style to the reports of proceedings in the divorce
court; were it not for these my mother might have allowed me to read newspapers
before I went to school; as it was she never did. I began reading Grimm
and Andersen. I remember reading them in the evening with twilight coming
on. All the windows of rooms I used in the house in Kent were I was brought
up faced the sunset. . . . When I went to Cheam School I was given a lot
of the Bible to read. This turned my thoughts eastward. For years no style
seemed to me natural but that of the Bible and I feared that I never would
become a writer when I saw that other people did not use it. When I learned
Greek at Cheam and heard of other gods a great pity came on me for those
beautiful marble people that had become forsaken and this mood has never
quite left me."

In 1905 he published Gods of Pergana. In it, Dunsany incorporated the
form of classical mythology into a world of his own making. Based on its
success, he produced a string of similar tales which were published under
the titles: Time and the Gods (1906), The Sword of Welleran (1908), and
A Dreamer's Tales (1910). These volumes were usually illustrated by Sidney
H. Sime, an artist who also much impressed Lovecraft and is often mentioned
in Lovecraft's stories. Of Dunsany's fantastic imagination Lovecraft wrote:
"Dunsany is the greatest of the name-coiners, and he seems to have three
distinct models-the Oriental (either Assyrian or Babylonian, or Hebrew
from the Bible), the classical (from Homer mostly), and the Celtic (from
the Arthurian cycle, etc.). Thus he invents Eastern-sounding words like
"gyshaw", "Sardathrion", "Bethmoora", etc. Hellenistic terms like "Argimenes",
"Poltarnees", etc., and pseudo-Celtic names like "Arleon" and "Carmorak".
I myself sometimes follow Dunsany's plan . . . " [1]

In 1909, Dunsany wrote his first play, The Glittering Gate, at the request
of W. B. Yeats. Its success at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin prompted Dunsany
to produce a long list of plays which were successfully staged from Moscow
and the United States. While his chief interests were in writing of plays
and tales, he managed to add the 1929 Fifty Poems to his bibliography.

While Lovecraft admired the plays, it was the fantasy stories which
impressed Lovecraft most. He says in "Lord Dunsany and His Work": "We here
find the best Dunsanian forms fully developed; the Hellenic sense of conflict
and fatality, the magnificently cosmic point of view, the superbly lyrical
flow of language, the Oriental splendour of colouring and imagery, the
titanic fertility and ingenuity of imagination, the mythical glamour of
fabulous lands 'beyond the East' or 'at the edge of the world,' and the
amazing facility for devising musical, alluring, and wonder-making proper
names, personal and geographical, on classical and Oriental models. Some
of Dunsany's tales deal with the objective world we know, and of strange
wonders therein; but the best of them are about lands conceivable only
in purple dream. These are fashioned in that purely decorative spirit which
means the highest art, having no visible moral or didactic element save
such quaint allegory as may inhere in the type of legendary lore to which
they belong. Dunsany's only didactic idea is an artist's hatred of the
ugly, the stupid, and the commonplace. We see it occasionally in touches
of satire on social institutions, and bits of lamentation over the pollution
of Nature by grimy cities and hideous advertising signs. Of all human institutions,
the billboard is most violently abhorrent to Lord Dunsany." [2]

In 1919 Lovecraft went to Boston with other amateur journalists to hear
Dunsany speak: "Arriving early at the Copley-Plaza, we obtained front seats;
so that during the address I sat directly opposite the speaker, not ten
feet from him. Dunsany entered late, accompanied and introduced by Prof.
George Baker of Harvard. He is of Galpinian build--6 ft. 2 in. in height,
and very slender. His face is fair and pleasing, though marred by a slight
mustache. In manner he is boyish and a trifle awkward; and his smile is
winning and infectious. His hair is light brown. His voice is mellow and
cultivated, and very clearly British. He pronounces were as wair, etc.
Dunsany first touched upon his ideals and methods; then hitched a chair
up to his reading table, seated himself, and commenced reading his short
play, The Queen's Enemies. This is based very obviously upon the anecdote
of Nitocris in the second book of Herodotus; but Dunsany averred that he
had purposely avoided reading details or even learning the names of the
characters in the story, for fear his original imaginative work on the
play might be hampered or impaired. I advise you to read it for yourself--it
is in Plays of Gods and Men, which every well-regulated library has or
ought to have on the shelves. Later Dunsany read selections from other
works of his, including a masterly burlesque on his own style--Why the
Milkman Shudders when he Sees the Dawn. As he read this, he could not repress
his own smiles and incipient chuckles! The audience was large, select,
and appreciative; and after the lecture Dunsany was encircled by autograph-seekers.
Egged on by her aunt, Miss Hamlet almost mustered up courage enough to
ask for an autograph . . . For mine own part, I did not seek a signature;
for I detest fawning upon the great." [3]

Its effect was immediate: "In 1919 I received the greatest literary
stimulus I had had since discovering Poe--through my discovery of Dunsany.
Under this new influence I began writing voluminously--though much of the
stuff was rotten and unduly imitative of my illustrious model." [4]
"As you infer, The White Ship is in part influenced by my new Dunsanian
studies. There are many highly effective points in Dunsany's style, and
any writer of imaginative prose will be better for having read him. . .
. Today I go down to obtain the very latest Dunsany book--just published--Unhappy
Far-Off Things, which I first saw advertised in the November Atlantic.
Recently I read Time and the Gods, which is not only highly interesting
but richly philosophical. You surely must read Dunsany--in places his work
is pure poetry despite the prose medium." [5]